The way you survive in the performing arts is by having a sense of your audience, and doing things which entertain and satisfy the audience, but in a more important way, cause the audience to question many things.

The real deep text of music and the whole reason that it has continued with the profundity and urgency that it has for over a thousand years, has to do with what the notes say, what the notes witness, different experiences of hope or doubt that people are able to distill and encode and pass on in this way.

You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is!

Extreme volume in music very often disguises a lack of actually important content.

The world changes when there's music in it.

The big difference between human happiness and sadness? Thirty-seven freakin' vibrations.

Being a conductor is kind of a hybrid profession because most fundamentally, it is being someone who is a coach, a trainer, an editor, a director.